The three major agencies, Equifax,
Experian and TransUnion, keep
a V.I.P. list of sorts, according to consumer lawyers and legal
documents, consisting of celebrities, politicians, judges and
other influential people. Those on the list — and they may not
even realize they are on it — get special help from workers in
the United States in fixing mistakes on their credit reports.
Any errors are usually corrected immediately, one lawyer said.

And the great unwashed? Disputes go straight into the proverbial
(and automated) black box, where overseas phone reps spend a
grand total of two minutes trying to sort our your problem. The
credit bureaus are supposed to investigate, but seldom actually
do, experts say.

The credit agencies don’t sweat such disputes for one very simple
reason — they don’t have to. First, their customers aren’t
consumers, but rather the creditors that provide or use credit
data. As one expert told the Times:

“There is no neutrality in the credit reporting agencies,” said
John Ulzheimer, who has been an expert witness
in more than 80 credit-related cases and is president of
consumer education at SmartCredit.com. “They
work for the lenders who buy credit reports from them, and
anyone who suggests otherwise is not being intellectually
honest.”

Second, getting to the bottom of why, say, grandma suddenly
stopped payment on her Harley-Davidson is expensive. That’s why
some bureaus pay their
outsourced contractors as little as 57 cents to try to
resolve a customer complaint. It’s also why reps commonly have
dispute quotas requiring them to blow through dozens of fraud,
identity theft or other complaints per day. In fact,
as Kevin Drum points out, the credit
agencies actually make money peddling services to protect
consumers from the bureaus’ own mistakes.

Locked-in state

Put another way, why would these companies wrack up costs helping
people who aren’t even their customers?

If the credit bureaus don’t need consumers, by contrast,
consumers need the bureaus. Unless you have satchels of cash
laying around, you obviously need a decent credit history when it
comes to, say, buying a car, attending college or, increasingly,
even getting a job. The upshot: Most consumers are captive to
companies that have little use for them.

Under the law, meanwhile, consumers have little recourse in
forcing the credit bureaus to correct an incorrect report. Given
the importance of a good credit record these days, that’s wrong.
It’s also economically counterproductive — people can’t spend or
borrow if their credit is unfairly marred.

The solution? Well, if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
survives the Republican hit-job in Congress, it will have
authority to develop stricter dispute-resolution rules. The goal
here is to ensure that when mistakes crop up in your credit
report, everyone can get some satisfaction.